Songfacts®:

• This is based on an Emily Dickinson poem, Essential Oils- are wrung:
  Essential oils are wrung
  The attar from the rose
  Is not expressed by suns alone,
  It is the gift of screws.
• This was originally recorded for Fleetwood Mac's 2003 album Say You Will, but was not included on the final set.
• Buckingham's Fleetwood Mac bandmates Mick Fleetwood (drums) and John McVie (bass) provided the rhythm section on this track. Buckingham told Live Daily that whilst McVie came in later and laid the bass tracks down, he particularly had a great time recording with Fleetwood. Said Buckingham: "If you focus on Mick, we've always had a camaraderie of spirit; we've always shared that sense of pushing the envelope, and he has a really animal style of playing drums in particular. So, on the title track, I think Mick just felt completely liberated to do what he loves to do best and doesn't always get to do in the context of Fleetwood Mac, which is to present a complete male energy out there, and to not worry about whether it holds a line in terms of taste or anything else. It's just a raw, primal expression. It's something he and I both love to do, really appreciate, and I think he hoped 'A Gift of Screws' ended up on a Fleetwood Mac album so that he could have gotten to play it. But we just had a ball in the studio--it was great fun."